The Story of the Mendocino Whale War

Words and photos by Nicholas Wilson

The little Pacific Coast town of Mendocino, California, has
long been a hotbed of activism for various causes. Thirty years ago, in 1976, the cause was
saving the remaining great whales from slaughter by Russian and Japanese
commercial whaling fleets.

In June, 1975, a Greenpeace Foundation patrol boat
located a Russian whaling fleet killing sperm whales off Cape Mendocino.
The Greenpeacers used the then novel tactic of launching a high-speed Zodiac
inflatable and maneuvering themselves between the Russian harpooners and the
whales. They captured dramatic film footage of a cannon-fired explosive
harpoon flying over their heads and striking a whale. When the film was
broadcast on national TV news, some Mendocino locals were inspired to get
involved in stopping the whale slaughter off our shores.

Byrd Baker and whale sculpture at MacCallum
House
Inn in Mendocino in 1976. The carving is still there.

Byrd Baker, a local wood sculptor, was probably
the one who came up with the name "Mendocino Whale War," and it was
war in contrast
to the peace in Greenpeace. (At the time, Greenpeace was a small nonprofit
foundation based in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, before it grew into
the big international environmental organization that is now known the world
over.)
Byrd and friends began campaigning to save the whales, and many other locals
joined the effort. California Gray Whales swim past Mendocino twice a year
on their migration between the Bering Sea where they feed and Baja California lagoons where they
breed and give birth. Whale watching from the rocky headlands of Mendocino has long been
a popular pastime, and people are very fond of the whales.

Byrd and other locals formed the Mendocino Whale War
Association in December 1975, with Byrd as one of the founding trustees. He was a charismatic fellow who could spin a
good yarn, and he looked the part of an old-time sea captain. With the help of media-savvy locals like John Bear, an advertising man who was the first president of
the MWW Association, and magazine writer Jules Siegel, the media soon picked up the
story. Major coverage began early in 1976 with a big feature in the Detroit Free Press
which hyped the idea of a small California
coastal town declaring war on Japan and the Soviet Union. This was at the height of the
Cold War!

The story led with the tale of "Mendocino Rose"
broadcasting radio messages in Russian urging the whalers to quit killing
whales and defect to the U.S. It was based on Tokyo Rose, who broadcast
Japanese propaganda to U.S. troops in World War II. Whether there really were
any Mendocino Rose broadcasts remains in dispute, but it made a good
story that caught the media's and the public's attention. The Associated Press
picked up the story, and then many other
newspapers, including the New York Times, published their own versions,
virtually all of them leading with "Mendocino Rose."

There was also a call to boycott Russian and Japanese goods
until they stopped killing whales. This tactic was adopted directly from the
Fund For Animals, which already was producing boycott bumper stickers and
flyers. The fact that there were virtually no Russian products sold in the
U.S. at the time didn't matter. It was the message of the boycott that
counted.

The MWW Association organized the 1st Annual
Whale Festival in Mendocino in March 1976. The goal was to make the
public aware that whales were still being hunted and turned into dog food,
lipstick and lubricant for nuclear missiles. The festival was also a fundraiser for an
ocean voyage to challenge the whalers off the Mendocino Coast, as Greenpeace
had done the previous summer.

There was a search for the right boat to go after the whalers.
One intriguing possibility was the Sioux City, a former whaling ship with a harpoon
cannon still mounted on its bow, docked in Richmond, next to the ruins of
the last whale processing plant in California. But the Sioux City needed too much work to
make it seaworthy, so the search continued. Byrd traveled to Vancouver, and
with help from Greenpeace he was able to charter the same boat Greenpeace had
used in 1975. The Phyllis Cormack was a 66 foot wooden fishing boat built in
1941, owned and captained by John Cormack and named
for his wife. Capt. Cormack, a Scots-Canadian, was a seasoned Gulf of Alaska
fishing skipper who was eager to take on the Russian whalers again.
Greenpeace had acquired a former Canadian Navy mine-sweeper named the James Bay, and they would be using the bigger, faster ship in
1976.

So, in late June, the Phyllis Cormack
anchored briefly in Mendocino Bay to take on some gear before heading down the
coast to San Francisco, where
the Mendocino Whale War's save-the-whales patrol voyage would be launched. After
loading up two Zodiac inflatables, fuel and provisions for the voyage, the
Mendocino Whale War headed out under the Golden Gate Bridge with four
Mendocino people aboard: Byrd Baker, J.D. Mayhew, John Griffith and Nicholas
Wilson, the official photographer, who thirty years later is the only one of
the four left to tell the tale.

Greenpeace and Mendocino Whale War rendezvous at
sea July 1, 1976.

After a few days at sea, on July 1 the Whale
War boat had a planned rendezvous with Greenpeace's James Bay about 100 miles
off Cape Mendocino, near where they had found the Russian whalers the year
before. There was much excitement as both ships launched Zodiacs bearing their
leaders for a secret strategy meeting. They agreed that
the MWW would stay in the vicinity patrolling for whalers while the James Bay went
on to San Francisco to do media work and fundraising for their own voyage. We
were to return to San Francisco July 5 for a big media welcome to be arranged
by Greenpeace.

We didn't spot any whalers off the
coast, but we did find a large fleet of big 300 ft. Soviet trawlers scraping the
ocean bottom with huge nets just outside the 12-mile limit that was then in
place. Up to ten of these Russian "draggers" could be seen at one
time, each dragging a net as wide as a football field is long. We came in close and shot photos and film of the big ships
hauling in
nets loaded with tons of fish. The Russians processed and froze the fish
aboard the large ships, and later transferred it to a big mother ship that
carried it back to the Soviet Union's Pacific port of Vladivostok. Late on
the night of July 3, we found and photographed a Russian mother ship servicing two of the draggers.

We saw and photographed a 150 ft. Korean crabber out of
Pusan that had just arrived and began putting out a couple hundred crab pots within
sight of the California Coast, but just outside the 12-mile limit. The U.S.
Coast Guard was on scene observing, but there was no law being broken. There
was agitation for extending the 12-mile limit much further out so as to
prohibit, or at least regulate, the taking of resources off the coast.

The photos of the Russian and Korean fishing boats were bought
and used by the San Francisco papers, UPI wire service, and Oceans magazine,
helping add to political pressure that brought about the present 200 mile
limit.

The Mendocino Whale War voyage ended with a brief courtesy
call to Mendocino the morning of the 4th of July, 1976, the Bicentennial Day,
and then a return to San Francisco the next morning. The big media welcome
promised by Greenpeace ended up being me and my camera in a Zodiac piloted by
Paul Watson. I had gone ashore in Mendocino, stayed up all night developing
film and making prints to distribute to the media, and then driven to San
Francisco. There I found the Greenpeacers mostly still asleep aboard the James
Bay. But Paul Watson, who later split from Greenpeace and formed his own Sea
Shepherd organization, was ready for action. He fired up a Zodiac and ran me
out at high speed to meet and photograph the Phyllis Cormack just as it
cleared the Golden Gate Bridge.

The Mendocino Whale War boat comes in under the
Golden Gate Bridge July 5, 1976.

After a few more days dealing photos to media outlets, that
was the end of the Mendocino Whale War for me. Byrd located an old school bus
and converted it into a Mendocino Whale War tour bus. He campaigned around the
country, talking at schools and civic organization meetings for some time after
that, spreading his message to "save God's whales."

With the help of a benefit concert by the Jerry Garcia Band, Greenpeace
was able to fuel and provision the James Bay in San Francisco, and they went on to find and engage the Russian whalers in the central
Pacific that summer. It came out later that Greenpeace had received secret U.S. government intelligence
about where to
find the whalers. Because the ocean is a huge place, it's not surprising that
the Mendocino Whale Warriors didn't find the whalers without that kind of
help.

The next year, 1977, Greenpeace recruited me to go to sea with
them as photographer aboard their anti-whaling ship Ohana Kai out of Honolulu.
But that's another story.

In 1986 the International Whaling Commission finally yielded
to growing public pressure and diminishing numbers of whales and
passed a moratorium on commercial whaling that continues today. Japan still kills hundreds of
whales annually under the pretext of "scientific research," then sells their meat
in Japan. Both Greenpeace and Sea Shepherd harassed the
Japanese whalers in Antarctic waters this past January, 2006.

In the summer of 2005, Ellen
Findlay Herdegen, a kindergarten teacher then and now, who was Secretary of the
Mendocino Whale War Association, turned over the group's archives to the
Kelley House historical museum in Mendocino. Ellen provided five ring binders
of carefully organized media clippings, photos, flyers, meeting minutes and
other documents. They are now on public exhibit.

Prints of some of
the photos are available by special order. Send email to mail (at) nwilsonphoto.com for prices and availability. Please
identify the photo by the file number displayed below the photo on its page in
the gallery.